TIVERTON -- Frank and Missy Correia had what might have been the best garden in all of North Tiverton.
They now have plastic flowers as lawn decorations. And the garden wedding they planned for their niece was held on their concrete driveway.
Nearby, Gail Corvello covered her backyard with $2,000 worth of interlocking foam tiles so the children at her home-based daycare center can play outdoors.
And down the street, Michelle and David Silva, fondly remember last winter's snow.
That was the only time they let their four children play in the yard.
Their nightmare began about two years ago when construction workers digging at the corner of Judson and Bay streets turned up dirt that smelled like oil. They also found a sheen on nearby groundwater.
After the first round of testing, Thomas Boving, professor of geosciences at the University of Rhode Island, told The Journal that several of the compounds were carcinogenic, with the benzo (a) pyrene the most dangerous.
"If that's present, that's a suspected cancer-causing agent," Boving said. "You don't really want that stuff around."
Tiverton later imposed a moratorium on any excavation in the neighborhood of 151 houses along Mount Hope Bay just south of the Fall River city line.
Selling, or even refinancing, a home became next to impossible. "We're all prisoners," Corvello says. "And there doesn't seem to be an end in sight."
'I saw the trucks down there' For most of the last century, dump trucks rumbled along the dirt roads of the Bay Street neighborhood. They became part of the landscape along with the piles of dark waste the trucks left behind.
Children often climbed on the big piles on the flatland close to the river and on the hillside that separates the area from the rest of the town. They played and they searched for unburnt coal to bring home.
Longtime residents, some in their 70s and 80s, say the waste came from a coal gasification plant owned by the Fall River Gas Co.
Several say that John Simpson Inc., a local construction company in business from 1918 to 1970, hauled waste to the area from the gas company.
Dennis Duarte, 79, remembers the large pile of waste near his home in the 1930s. "I saw the trucks down there. There was nothing in secret."
Gene Camara, 85, remembers living in his family's small bungalow on Mount Hope Avenue, not far from the Simpson property on State Avenue.
In 1931, Camara, then 13, befriended schoolmate Alvin Simpson, hoping the friendship would grant him access to the "monstrous" pile of gas waste on the side of Simpson's home. The pile, Camara says, was rich with coke, pieces of coal not completely burned off in the gasification process.
Residents would use the coke for cooking and heating.
"They used to get it from Fall River Gas Company and dump in his yard," recalls Camara. "The only way you could get the coke was to know one of the family. . . . We all go down on a Saturday morning and fill up two or three bags then bring it home. As long as I can remember, [the pile] was there; the people from that neighborhood used to pick coke because they were all friends."
Charles Perry, 78, remembers seeing the gas waste on Judson Street when he was a boy.
On some hot days, he says you could see steam rising from the bluish shavings near the corner of Judson and Bay streets.
And he says, "You'd see the water going down the street green or blue when it rained. Even before all this, my family used to say, 'Boy we would never want to build a house down there.' Then it got developed."
Builder Joseph Farias told The Journal he purchased property on Bay Street from the Simpson family in the 1980s. But before he bought the property, Farias said the Simpsons had scraped off and sold the topsoil. He said the Simpsons replaced the topsoil with other fill.
Leave shoes at the door Michelle and David Silva bought their first home at 29 Canonicus St. for $165,000 a couple of months before the contamination was announced. The property looked like a great fit for their four children -- David Jr., Meagan, Amber and Brendan.
The backyard was dirt. Still, the children loved it. After playing, they would come back in the house "covered," Michelle Silva says.
David Silva built a jungle gym and a clubhouse. He planted bushes along the front and sides of the house.
Things changed quickly when word spread of the sewer workers' discovery.
In September 2002, a firm hired by the town found cyanide in neighborhood at 1,130 parts per million, more than five times the residential limit. Benzo (a) pyrene amounts were 1,100 times greater than the state's limit.
The Silvas told their kids to play on the grass in the front yard. They set up an inflatable pool and tried to distract the children from the jungle gym in the back.
Then in March of 2003, the state Department of Health warned residents:
Avoid soil exposure.
Wash your hands frequently after being outside.
Leave shoes at the door.
Thoroughly wash soil from yard-grown produce.
"We told the kids that they had to play in the driveway," Michelle Silva said. "They didn't understand. . . . And then we spent $1,000 on dirt. We bought dirt to cover dirt."
David Silva says, "We had the American dream and now I'm thinking we're better off going somewhere else and renting a place."
The gas company took borings and found arsenic -- many times above the state standard -- under their front lawn, but not in back. Benzo (a) pyrene was also discovered in high levels along the perimeters of their one-acre lot. They figured only snow could trap the poisons in the dirt. So after the first snowfall last winter, the whole family raced outside to make snow angels and snowmen.
Around this time, their children started getting sick.
Amber, then 5, was diagnosed with asthma. Meagan began getting rashes on her arm and bad headaches. The family doctor suggested having the children tested for arsenic poisoning.
"Two vials of blood were taken from each child and we had to collect the kids' urine for 24 hours," Michelle Silva said. The tests were negative.
But engineers hired by the gas company concluded that the Silvas do not need remediation on their property because the contamination found was not "a significant health risk."
"They did nine borings on one acre of land," David Silva said. "That's not enough."
Michelle Silva said, "I have four reasons to want additional testing."
"We want to be sure we're not raising our children in a deathtrap."
The gas company investigates Looking for the source of the contamination, New England Gas commissioned a study of several businesses that operated in North Tiverton in the last century.
Among the businesses studied was John Simpson Inc.
"A review of Fall River and Tiverton directories indicated that John Simpson Jr. operated a 'teaming and trucking business' at 2 Bay Street in 1921, a 'General Trucking' business at 15 State Avenue in 1931, and the company letterhead in 1960 lists 'excavating, general contractor, building mover and trucker,' " according to the report from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc.
The firm concluded that New England Gas was not responsible for cleaning up the properties owned by the Simpson family because other industrial uses were probably responsible for the contamination.
The report did not indicate there was any connection between Simpson and the gas company.
Ernie Simpson, 74, is the sole living son of John Simpson.
In an interview, Ernie Simpson acknowledged that his family's company worked with the gas company, but he did not say what kind of work it did.
"I don't really want to get into that," he said.
A New England Gas Co. spokesman would not say whether the Simpsons ever hauled waste from Fall River Gas' gasification plant.
"That's something that we're actively investigating and we're not prepared to make a comment about that at this time," said Chris Medici, director of communications for New England Gas. "It's yet another piece of the puzzle that will eventually be put in place."
Meanwhile, a risk-assessment agency hired by Southern Union told residents last October that things were not so bad:
"Activities such as walking and playing, gardening, ingesting home vegetables or digging a subsurface structure should not have a significant impact on human health from exposure to constituents in the soil."
'There's no family history of cancer' But Frank and Missy Correia say they were told by the agency working for the gas company that the situation was different at their home.
Last year, the gas company's engineers pulled up a soil sample that had a blue-green color to it. Other samples had tar balls in them. Correia said one worker looked at the dirt and called her supervisor.
"She walked away, but I heard her say, 'We've got real problems here,' " he said.
And the state Health Department gave the Correias a "don't list" that was more restrictive then the one sent around the neighborhood.
Don't garden.
Don't let children play in the yard.
Don't forget to rinse off the cars once a week.
Don't go on the deck without washing it first.
"If they're telling you to wash the deck, then something's seriously wrong," Correia says.
Correia's mother-in-law Genevieve Beirola and her late husband bought the house more than 30 years ago from the late John Simpson. The Correias' home, owned since 1999 by Frank and Missy, sits on part of the site of Simpson's former construction and trucking business.
Missy Correia says her mother has breast cancer and her father died of cancer five years ago.
"But," she says, "there's no family history of cancer. . . . There's so many unknowns. As much as I love this property, I'd move in a heartbeat. "
The family used to have clam boils and cookouts four times a year. The flower gardens were a big part of Frank Correira's life. He tended tulips, foxglove, lilies of the valley and roses planted 30 years.
Last year, they had one on Memorial Day and they had planned a spectacular garden wedding for their niece. News of the contamination changed everything. It was too late to find another location, so they had the ceremony in the driveway.
Who's responsible? The gasification plant closed in mid 1950s, 20 years before the first piece of federal legislation to address toxic waste from its point of origin to disposal was the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976.
The act requires the generator of solid waste to ensure its proper disposal, among other things.
In Tiverton, Jeffrey Crawford, an principal environmental scientist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, reviewed the soil tests, talked with neighbors and read the minutes of a town Planning Board meeting from 17 years ago.
He concluded last year that the contamination probably came from the gas company.
DEM issued a letter of "potential responsibility" to the Southern Union Corp., the parent company of New England Gas, the company that took over Fall River Gas in 1999.
In response to the DEM letter of 2003, New England Gas commissioned an engineering company to conduct groundwater and soil testing throughout the Bay Street neighborhood.
The tests turned up pockets of contamination, but the gas company disputed the assertion that the entire area was used as its former dumping grounds.
In January, DEM criticized the soil collection and testing methods of the gas company's engineers and challenged the company's conclusions.
The DEM, in its report, says: "It should be noted that even if the Simpsons operated on these properties, the former Fall River Manufactured Gas Plant still has some liability if the waste material came from that facility," the DEM report says.
The report also criticizes the gas company's failure to release a history of its disposal practices.
The company, DEM writes, "should have included historical information concerning the neighborhood, the surrounding area, along with historical information as it relates to the former Fall River Gas Company and its past operations and waste material disposal practices."
A spokesman for New England Gas Co. said an internal investigation is under way, but would not comment further.
'We have to do this' As the president of the Environmental Neighborhood Awareness Committee of Tiverton (ENACT), Gail Corvello starts most of her mornings on the phone with concerned residents.
"All these concerns," she said. "Things they never thought of. 'My mom and dad's cancer, do you think the soil is responsible?'
". . . It's a fear factor. People are afraid of their properties, myself included. The fear of the unknown. We don't know what's here. We just have snippets."
Corvello herself was among the first to be affected when the sewer excavations in front of her daycare center turned up blue dirt. She didn't wait for testing to be finished to begin keeping the children inside.
Last August, testing showed her property contained more than four times the limit for lead and arsenic and five times the limit for benzo (a) pyrene that the state recommends as safe. She turned down an offer from Southern Union to temporarily relocate her family and business.
"The thought of leaving this stuff in the ground for the children and their children just kills me," Corvello said. "Leaving it here is not an option."
She feels strongly about the environment. Even before the soil contamination crisis, she had put in reverse-osmosis water filters and had borrowed $7,000 to purchase a nontoxic, chemical-free wooden playground. (That playground sat in her backyard unused for nearly two years until Corvello installed the foam tiles.)
In March, workers hired by Southern Union Workers scraped out of a portion of Corvello's front yard and replaced it with clean soil. The company said the soil posed an "imminent danger."
"They put clean soil right up against blue soil [in the earth beside the hole]," she said, showing pictures of the excavation work. "What good does that do?"
Corvello and the rest of ENACT are determined to get the whole neighborhood cleaned. In addition to all of their meetings with local, state and federal officials, they have a Web site and a newsletter.
"I have to do this," she said. "We have to do this. Our lives are at stake."
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